The resignation of Morgan McSweeney changes little if anything. The crisis engulfing the Labour government is not about one or two rogue actors, and it won’t be fixed by a sacrificial resignation. This is a deep-rooted and systemic crisis of the entire political project that has dominated Labour since the 1990s. If there is any hope of moving beyond it in a way that resets the party, government and the country, then it is imperative that the party, the government and the country understand and address the causes of the scandal, not just its symptoms. And those causes are better known as the story of New Labour, which can be told in four parts.
Part one. The sorry tale starts in the 1990s when Labour found itself profoundly on the back foot, its whole sense of confidence and purpose shattered, not just by almost two decades of Thatcherism but by the defeat of the trade unions and the collapse of communism. In its weakened state, and having settled on the belief after four straight election defeats that this was a “conservative country”, the best its young leaders thought they could do was to graft a thin veneer of social democracy onto a rampant neoliberalism. One of the key architects of this pallid project was, of course, Peter Mandelson, who went on to be the arch mentor of McSweeney.
The strategy of New Labour was to bend to the power of the new right in return for small concessions for the left. In Stuart Hall’s brilliant phrase, the party enacted a bamboozling “double shuffle”. In short, the country got Sure Start, but at the price of PFI and the Iraq war. As a project, it eventually proved to be worth less than nothing. It embedded the Eighties revolution, with New Labour taking marketisation to places even Thatcher dared not go. Mandelson’s dark arts were not just an adaptation of traditional PR but central to a project that had to conceal the chasm between Labour’s historic socialist values and mission and how it embedded neoliberalism in government. But this was essential to New Labour’s purpose. Labour cannot win the country from the left, the axiom went. The very label “New” was a signal to the country that they were “Not Labour”.
Part two. It is now 2015. Labour had been meekly turned out of office five years before, as the economic crash, which it helped bring about by liberating the City from effective regulation, crashed its reputation. Not even Mandelson could spin forever the contradictions between the greed of global finance and the need for social justice. Most of Labour’s limited successes were quickly unpicked by David Cameron and George Osborne, including Sure Start. Ed Miliband spent the years in opposition almost but not quite making a break with the New Labour past. And so he inevitably lost the election.
Up steps Liz Kendall, the arch-Blairite, to reclaim the throne after Miliband’s seemingly disastrous flirtation with a different agenda. She secures 5 per cent of the membership vote, who flock instead around the unlikely and ultimately tragic figure of Jeremy Corbyn, finding in him a vessel for their deep desire to move decisively beyond Blairism. Kendall’s campaign is led by Morgan McSweeney, with Mandelson lurking in the wings. His abiding lesson from the experience was this: the Labour right can never win an internal election on its own platform, but only by pretending to be “of the left”. In short, it had to lie to win.
Part three. Spool forward to 2020. Keir Starmer is standing for the Labour leadership on a platform of “Corbynism without Corbyn”. He “pledges” he will maintain the politics and some of the personnel from the Corbyn era while merely professionalising the party. On this solemn promise, he wins at a canter. By now, McSweeney has mixed a predominantly New Labour electoral strategy with old Labour right hyper-factionalism and Blue Labour sentiment on issues like asylum. It is an odd mix. With Steve Reed, now a Cabinet member, having secured total control of the Labour machine via the patronage of Starmer and Mandelson, they begin their systematic and relentless annihilation of all sections of the Labour left, revenge for their dismal failure in 2015.
And then part four. Leap ahead to 2024. After the self-destruction of both the Tories and the SNP, Labour wins a huge majority in the general election. But they do so on only 34 per cent of the vote, having done little if any planning on how to change the country. But worse than that, this is now a totally deformed project. Founded on the external belief that Labour can never win being Labour, and the internal distortion of a fake left leadership bid that immediately turned back to the failed politics of New Labour, it was a government doomed to disappoint.
Given all this monumental incoherence, who are you going to rely on to manoeuvre and trick your way through the chaos? Of course, none other than Peter Mandelson, who moved from the shadows of McSweeney to the front link job in Washington. And so, a tiny clique of people desperately tries to manage a polycrisis world in which they have no vision, few principles and little programme. With their twisted and narrow project ensuring a brittle government with no agility, U-turn follows U-turn, poll drop follows poll drop, and scandal follows scandal.
The Epilogue. Some of our players are guilty men, having purposefully bullied, lied and cheated Labour to this position. Others stood silently by in the hope of preferment. Even now, their silence over Mandelson makes them complicit. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of members have been pushed out of the door and millions of voters have found new political homes. In every sense – morally, politically and electorally – Labour has been brought to its knees. Peter Mandelson is just the face of a mentality that dragged the party to this endpoint. And now McSweeney is just one person jumping overboard as the ship sinks. All the guilty people must now go, but they must take with them their project of capitulation, cynicism and coercion. This is not the Peter Mandelson or the Morgan McSweeney scandal. It is the New Labour Scandal.
Therefore, the abiding lesson for those left in the party is this. A total reset of the Labour project must begin. It will need to be professional and pragmatic, but it will also have a deep and abiding vision of what a better society looks like. Its lodestars will be equality, sustainability and democracy. It will end the internal hyper-factionalism along with the hostility to outsiders, working with everyone who shares this vision of a good society. And it will implement a policy agenda that can realistically tackle the cost of living and climate crisis. In so doing it can defeat not just Reform but the causes of Reform.
Finally, it will be a Labour Party that learns the most important lesson of politics: that means always shape ends. You cannot build a better world by deceiving both the public and party membership. A resurrected Labour Party must do all these things and more. Or it will die. It very nearly has.
[Further reading: Peter Mandelson is gone, and so is New Labour]
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